Prophesying War: Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and The Book of Isaiah

Abstract: This article re-reads Djuna Barnes's 1936 novel Nightwood in light of the novel's numerous references to the Book of Isaiah. While a preponderance of Nightwood scholarship focuses on the novel's investigations of gender and sexuality, this article focuses on the novel's interest in early twentieth-century European history and the effects of historical trauma on religious experience. By exploring how Nightwood borrows its language and tropes from Hebrew prophecy, the author argues that Nightwood , like the major Hebrew prophetic texts, can best be understood as war literature. As a work of war literature, the novel, like the Books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, constitutes a public expression of grief over wartime trauma and a warning to the nations about another oncoming war. Read in this way, Barnes's novel belongs in the literary historical category termed "Catholic decadence," rather than in the category of atheistic modernism with Virginia Woolf.